Tag Archives: childhood

For almost twenty years, this Hong Kong orchid tree has welcomed me home every day. I recall the evening we planted it. It was at the end of a hot Saturday when our little family drove to a nursery in Moon Valley in search of a tree exactly like those which provided shade during our weekend strolls through the Biltmore Fashion Park. At the time, this open-air mall boasted a row of what I finally learned were Hong Kong Orchids. My then two year old loved to stand on the tips of her toes and stretch each of her piano-player fingers high into the sky, hoping to pluck one of the enticing pink blossoms that hung there, blooms as worthy as lilies of Georgia O’Keefe’s attention.

So enchanted was Sophie by these, that she wanted a pretty pink tree for our yard. Naturally, I had the perfect spot, because right in front of her bedroom window, she should have something magnificent to look out to every morning. Too, it would fill, at last, a space previously occupied for over seven decades by a grapefruit tree that had given up the ghost.

My girl was at that tender age when she needed to and wanted to hold my hand everywhere we went, on a mission to find a stray cat, a hummingbird drinking from Mexican honeysuckle, or the pink tree, the one that was proving to be more elusive than we had anticipated. The nursery was all out of mature orchid trees, and the saplings were wholly unimpressive. It was anti-climactic at best when we finally found, attached to a single green stalk, all of three feet tall and the width of my little finger, a price tag identifying it as the coveted Hong Kong orchid. Nary a bloom just a couple of leaves drooping sadly from the top of the stalk. The young man who sold it to me was very charming and assured me it would be providing “all kinds of shade” for us in no time. Skeptical, we bought it anyway, and off we went.

More to appease this tired little girl and her mother, than to show off any horticultural prowess, her daddy planted and staked what he called a skinny little excuse for a tree in the vacant spot. Then we began tending it. Like the watched kettle, it was naturally unresponsive to our vigilance. Then, almost magically, not unlike Sophie herself, it grew up all too quickly. Beautiful, independent, fragile and alert, with a strength that sometimes takes my breath away.

Bending and swaying just when it should, at all the right times for almost twenty years, our pink tree is a survivor, standing up to scorching, record-breaking temperatures, frost, intense monsoons, and even a “haboob” in spite of our abandoning it for the cool central coast of California. Unfazed, it was waiting for us when we returned as if to remind us that we live and move in its shadow.

This, my favorite tree, for many years, annually inspired a shock of petunias in the flower beds, geraniums, fragrant pink stock, freesias that remind me of my father planting bulbs, and snapdragons. Too, it played a role in the color of paint I chose for my front door – I had entirely too much fun mixing colors, one of which was “black raspberry” to create something that would complement the pink tree. And as I remembered this week while reading through old scrapbooks, the tree was the inspiration behind Sophie’s first foray into poetry for which she earned a blue ribbon and honorable mention in her grade school’s annual poetry contest.

Through all the beginnings and endings, the reminders of the fragility and fleetingness of life, and the finality of death, the pink tree abides. Transcendent.

Lawn-mowers and leaf-blowers strike up their tune much earlier when summer arrives in the desert southwest. By the time I left for work on Monday, I noticed, with the same kind of resignation triple-digit temperatures bring every year, that the flower beds were empty, the freshly mown grass less green, and, where just weeks before long branches hung low and heavy with hot pink blooms, were almost-bare limbs exposed to the sky above our house.

I remember the uncharacteristically hot Spring day when our little family drove to a the Moon Valley nursery in search of a tree just like those which provided some shade during our weekend strolls through the Biltmore Fashion Park. At the time, this open-air mall boasted a row of what I finally learned were Hong Kong Orchids; my then three-year old loved to stand on the tips of her toes and stretch each of her piano-player fingers high into the sky, hoping to pluck one of the enticing pink blossoms that hung there, blooms I believe as worthy as lilies of Georgia O’Keefe’s attention.

So enchanted was Sophie, that she wanted such a tree for our yard. I had the perfect spot, right in front of her bedroom window, where there should be something magnificent to wake up to every morning. And, from a more practical perspective, it would fill the space previously occupied for over seven decades by a grapefruit tree that had finally given up the ghost.

Sophie was still at that tender age when she needed to and wanted to hold my hand everywhere we went – on a mission to find a stray cat in the oleanders that bordered our back yard, or a hummingbird drinking from a Mexican honeysuckle, or the pink tree that was proving to be more elusive than I had anticipated. The nursery was all out of mature orchid trees, and the saplings were wholly unimpressive. It was anti-climactic at best when at last we found, attached to a single green stalk, all of three feet tall and the width of my little finger, a price tag identifying it as the coveted Hong Kong orchid – nary a bloom just a couple of leaves drooping sadly from the top. The young man who sold it to me was very charming and assured me it would provide “all kinds of shade” for us in no time. Skeptical, we bought it anyway, and off we went.

More to appease a tired little girl and her mother, than to show off any horticultural prowess, my husband planted and staked this skinny little excuse for a tree in the vacant spot. We began tending it, and like the watched kettle, it was unresponsive to our vigilance. Then, almost magically, not unlike Sophie herself, it grew up – beautiful, independent, fragile, and alert, with a resilience that sometimes takes my breath away.

Bending and swaying just when it should, at all the right times over the past decade, her pink tree has survived scorching, record-breaking temperatures, frost, intense monsoons, and even a “haboob” that hit Phoenix when we had abandoned the heat for California’s central coast. Unfazed, it was waiting for us when we returned as if to remind us that we live and move in its shadow.

It has annually inspired a shock of petunias in the flower beds, geraniums, fragrant pink stock, freesias, and snapdragons. It even played a role in the color I chose for my front door – I had entirely too much fun mixing colors, one of which was “black raspberry” to create a complement to Sophie’s pink tree.

And as I remembered this week while reading through old scrapbooks, her Hong Kong orchid was also the inspiration behind my darling girl’s first foray into poetry for which she earned a blue ribbon and honorable mention in her grade school’s annual poetry contest.Through all the beginnings and endings, the reminders of the fragility and fleetingness of life, and the finality of death, the pink tree abides.

Why yes, you did. Relentlessly. It was funnier to you than it was to me.

Teetering on the edge of adolescence in the early seventies, I instinctively knew that Crystal’s coiffure, a big triangular purple frizz, belonged only on the BBC, in the groovy world of cut-out animation created by Hilary Hayton.

Someone, probably not a feminist, had deemed more acceptable and in my case, forever elusive, that silken sheet of hair that hung straight down the backs of other girls in standard-issue blonde, brown, black or grey. Crystal, with Alistair by her side, was not cut out for corporate. Upside down, afloat in the sky among rainbows and bubbles, she was maddeningly oblivious to the very concept of “a bad hair day.” I did everything in my power to distance myself from her, which in retrospect is a bit sad, because Crystal was her own girl. It was no small task, as I was reminded by the boy – now middle-aged man – who reached across an impressive stretch of time and distance to ask on Facebook if he used to call me Crystal Tipps.

The 1970s represented the dark ages of hair care in Northern Ireland, with the curly among us left largely to our own devices. Major hair-care discoveries of the twentieth century were on the back burner – anti-frizz serum, leave-in conditioner, mousse, spritzes, and spray gels. Diffusers. Ionic hair-dryers. Microfiber towels. Accordingly, there were major hair mistakes – one of my most spectacular being a spiral perm that I rationalized would mathematically cancel out the natural curls. That paled in comparison to the fateful day when I allowed a desultory hairdresser in a Ballymena “salon” to cut my hair short. Like most of the nation, he was undeniably smitten with then-Lady Diana Spencer, whose short hair helped her achieve the kind of acceptability – and accessibility – that Crystal Tipps had been denied. Brandishing his Clairol 1200 hairdryer and a round brush, he presented me with glossy magazines devoted to hair that led me to believe a Lady Di do was just what I needed; it would be “tidier” and “far less trouble,” its short layers, very short. Liar, liar, pants on fire. Had I known better, before the first snip, I would have asked him to recite the laws governing curly hair, which include the following:

Curly hair is unpredictable.

Manageability of curly hair is directly related to the unpredictability of the curl.

Curly hair is longer – much longer – when combed through wet.

Would-be princesses and Charlie’s Angels have crews of “people” on hair duty. Working class girls do not.

Shampoo in moderation. Only condition the ends.

No two curls are the same.

Curls must be cut one at a time.

The curls will win. Every time.

While most everyone else was distracted by Lady Diana’s sapphire engagement ring, I was growing out The. Worst. Haircut. Ever, immortalized in a Valentine verse composed during his tea-break by a boyfriend (who, incidentally, had great hair). It went like this: “You’re very special /you’re very rare/even though/you have no hair.” ‘

‘Twas a lovely ditty, followed shortly thereafter, before I went off to college, by “The End.“

For a time, I was convinced of a conspiracy around curly hair. It was reminiscent of the way mothers withhold information about childbirth. No, the styling of naturally curly hair is not the same as giving birth, but both must be experienced first-hand to be fully appreciated. I am still a little bitter that when I was pregnant, not one of my friends-with-children divulged any of the more painful details of childbirth. When I asked about The Pain, and told them to spare no details, they just mumbled vaguely, as though in a trance. Avoiding eye contact, they lied and said they could not remember any of it, yet in the same breath would tell me to be sure to ask for an epidural – “just to be on the safe side.” My mother, to give credit where credit’s due, remembers at least two important details: it was a forceps delivery that “you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy,” and it was Good Friday which she thought was a good sign. Of what I’m not sure. To boot, there was snow on the ground which delayed my father’s arrival to the hospital. In Ballymena. Invariably, this detail will lead to an extended treatise on the unpredictability of Irish weather helping her deftly avoid any elaboration on the forceps.

Curly hair makes a statement when sometimes the only sort of statement that’s desired is: ‘ I belong; I blend in.

Precisely. In the classroom, the boardroom, the waiting room, the conference room – the Oval Office – we just want to belong, but not in a way that feels uncomfortably like conforming or settling. It can be a tough row to hoe, often requiring compromise if not complete surrender.

I had begun brokering a kind of peace with my hair because of the products available by 1988, and then along came Melanie Griffith’s Tess in Working Girl chopping off her hair because, after all, if “You wanna be taken seriously, you need serious hair.” Seriously? Adding insult to injury, a decade later, Up Close and Personal Robert Redford’s character tells a big-haired shoulder-padded Michelle Pfeiffer who just wants to make it in broadcast journalism to “do something about the hair.” By the end of the film, her character has a short, brunette bob and a top job at the network. And just in case we were in any doubt about what might happen when women let their hair down, we watched Thelma and Louise drive off a cliff.

Then there is Julia Roberts whose characters are almost always winners, big hair notwithstanding. Before she was Erin Brockovich, back in 1997, she was “the best man” in My Best Friend’s Wedding, but not very “serious.” Meanwhile, I was enjoying pregnancy, my hair reaping the benefits of all those pre-natal vitamins. Big belly. Big hair. Big hopes for motherhood. Instead of commenting on my lustrous hair, colleagues would muse aloud, “Haven’t you had that baby yet?” or, bizarrely, “Are you still here?” followed by, “Really? You don’t know what you’re having?” Even sales people – strangers – would look at each other in disbelief and whisper loudly, “She doesn’t know what she’s having.”

“A human.”

This was a wholly unsatisfactory response that typically provoked a protracted agonizing debate over whether my human child’s nursery should be pink or blue.

Tired of all this, I decided one Friday afternoon, towards the end of the third trimester, that rather than go to Target to stock up on green or yellow non gender-specific clothes for 0-3 month-old humans, I would have my hair “done” at a swish salon in Scottsdale. It was one of the best, I had been told, by someone with children and straight hair. There I was, my hair freshly colored in a caramel-honey hue, trimmed in long, manageable layers. By this time, I was proficient in the lexicon of curly-hair-care. I knew all the right products to use and had even mastered special drying techniques including the art of scrunching, diffusing my hair upside-down, and air-drying (or using a paper towel) to avoid “disturbing the curl.”

Given all of this, it defies logic that on that particular evening, I would allow an intense stylist, dressed like a hungry Johnny Cash, to blow my hair dry with an enormous round brush, thus taking me back to those heady days following Princess Diana’s engagement. I remember choosing to concentrate on my magazine rather than the mirror, but when my stylist was distracted by the early arrival of a straight-haired woman who reported the news on a local TV channel, I looked up to confront my reflection. There were four impossibly large round brushes nesting in my hair. Four. I resembled a failed test subject and wanted to cry. But wait. There was a method to his madness. Once he removed those brushes, and spun me around in that chair, choirs of angels began to sing. My hair would have been the envy of any morning news anchorwoman. It was big, but by God, it was straight and smooth. It was almost presidential. I had straight hair. Granted, it lasted only for five hours – as long as it took to achieve. I savored every minute – running my fingers through it, throwing my head back, tossing my tresses around – because I knew that once a drop of water hit my head, it would all be over.

Think hair doesn’t matter? Think again. The writers of Elle magazine consulted a psychologist, with a real PhD, to answer the question that keeps us awake at night: “Is Your Hair Holding you Back?” Well, is it? Hillary Clinton, arguably holding one of the most important positions in the world at the time, made the headlines more than a time or two, not because of some act of diplomacy that might prevent yet another war, but because she had gone out in public on what some considered an unacceptably Bad Hair Day, made all the worse because she had done so without make-up. When Madame Secretary changed the rules of engagement, the critics flipped out.

Then last night, the Democratic party made history and nominated Mrs. Clinton as its presidential candidate. She made history – and so did her hair – each highlighted on the fashion page of the New York Times the morning after:

Mrs. Clinton looked supremely unflappable: perfectly tailored and in control. Not a hair out of place (but some hair nicely waved). The kind of person who could carry the nuclear codes with aplomb.

Source: @HillaryClinton

“Supremely unflappable.”

Hair matters.

I remember in response to learning I had cancer, a life-long friend’s initial response went exactly like this:

Oh no! What about your hair?”

Observing that I still had my hair several months later, the same person felt compelled to ask about details of my treatment and to pass judgement on my decision not to pursue chemotherapy. Here’s the truth. Some of it had to do with hair loss. I was afraid to lose my hair. I know. It’s only hair. However, hair-loss, albeit temporary, is a distressing possibility – eyelashes and eyebrows, the hair on my head. People told me “it’s only hair – it will grow back,” or “your bald head will show the world you’re battling cancer and winning.” Remember, I told them, I am an unwilling conscript in this battle.

In my quietest moments, I try to trace this fear to its source. One of my favorite writers, Edna O’Brien, tells us we can never escape the themes of childhood. And so, maybe it was my mother who often alluded to the Bible, referring to a woman’s hair as “her crowning glory,” or the whimsy of my grandmother comparing my hair color to that of a new penny. More harrowing perhaps, is my recollection of stories in the news, when I was a little girl with very long hair, stories of young Roman Catholic women who were tarred and feathered, publicly humiliated for having associated with British soldiers in the late 1960s in Northern Ireland. To this day, I am haunted by the thought of a barbaric punishment that left them shorn and exposed. Whatever its source, this fear of chemotherapy is irrational, and it feels shallow to have spent at least a part of each day since I first heard “tumors,” fretting about the fate of my hair. And, should the cancer spread, and if my oncologist tells me that chemotherapy is the sensible thing to do, then we’ll play the numbers.

The prospect of losing my hair to a cancer treatment also made me feel guilty about the numerous times I have cursed it, and all the time and money I have spent trying to coax it into being more “sensible.” Like many women, I have abused my hair for years with products from a largely unregulated industry that may even have contributed to my cancer. So instead of wasting my time with drivel about whether a woman should be taken more or less seriously depending on whether her hair is straight or curly, short or long, how about helping me understand what needs to happen in order to address the lack of regulation that allows our shampoos, conditioners, cleansers, and more “exotic” – toxic – treatments, to contain the very chemicals that may have caused the cancer diagnosis that rocked my world?

All in vain, I still partake. I color my hair and use products that, upon closer inspection, should scare me into stopping. Every single day, the curl is different; and every month, the gray stubbornly returns, reminding me that I am not really in charge.

Almost a decade ago, I found a drawing my daughter. It has become my favorite picture of me, for me. Where art again meets reality, my budding artist was clearly struggling to get my hair just right. Frustrated, it was with a long sigh and a scribble of orange crayon and black marker, that she forced it into semi-straight submission and pondered A Bad Hair Day. She nailed it.

That hair is almost a triangle, resurrecting Crystal Tipps, for whom I have developed a belated respect. I like her, almost enough to believe Kristianna Michaelides, Australia’s leading curl specialist (now there’s a position that did not exist in the seventies), when she waxes philosophical:

Curly-haired people are seen as mischievous, with a sense of humour. I associate curls with creativity. People with curls tend to be at ease with themselves – if they’re not fighting their curls, they must be happy within themselves.

“Each of us, as we pass through life, leaves traces of the passage. Sometimes the signs are as slight as a bent leaf, a twisted twig, or a seed dispersed. Sometimes, we leave behind the husks of former selves or castaway restraints. While following these trails, we grow ever more aware of our lives in connection-to our foremothers, to the elemental truths of nature, to the selves we hope to become. Woven together, we begin to see the shifting patterns of our intertwined lives. The studio work represents my journey, my passage.”

One afternoon, in the central Phoenix kitchen of an Irish friend, I glanced up from my cup of tea to find whimsy – Sarena Mann’s paper maché ladies floating from the wooden beams above me. Enchanting, they reminded me of the fairies I once imagined in our garden when I was a girl – curious and delicate. Crafted from tiny bits of fabric, colored paper, and wire, they are always on the move. Forever free, graceful, beckoning, and on the dreariest of days, they work their charm. Like fireflies.

I have accumulated over a dozen of them over the years, and now I cannot imagine looking up and not seeing them dance above me, each one a temptress and tempted to soar – standing on her swing, or with butterflies, balloons, a kite, a swath of silken ribbon. Pixies, elfins, fairies – they conjure Van Morrison’s ‘gypsy souls.’

My collection was complete until yesterday afternoon when I spotted scores of them fluttering in a booth at The Temple Festival of the Arts. “Are you Sarena Mann?” I asked the woman inside, bursting to tell her just how much I love her craft and the heart in it.

Modest, she confirmed her identity, and she stood there with her hands on her hips, as my words tumbled out about how much her creations reminded me of the fairies and the folklore that shaped my childhood; about my early years of motherhood when I whispered to my little girl that our backyard was a magical place, home to her own “pixie pals,” flitting from flower to flower, leaving love letters at Christmas or Easter or when a baby tooth fell out.

Of course I had to buy another. And another. A Miko caught my eye, bearing six tiny baskets, and a message of peace and prosperity; and, for Sophie, it was a woman in a boat, strong and sailing away into the mystic, a paper crane at the bow.

As I watched Sarena wrap her delicate creations in tissue paper and place them in a brown paper bag, I connected again the notion of being good with one’s hands and being in good hands. Soon, I was transported back to another time and place, remembering my mother and father and the artisanal handiwork – the craft – that imbued the rural County Derry where they were raised. More a matter of economic necessity in those days, people were “good with their hands” – their dress-making, baking, knitting, turf-cutting, and roof-thatching all shaped by and shaping the townlands in which they lived. Seamus Heaney‘s poems are peopled with such artisans, men like my father, men like the Thatcher – solitary and stoic.

“Then fixed the ladder, laid out well honed blades
And snipped at straw and sharpened ends of rods
That, bent in two, made a white-pronged staple
For pinning down his world, handful by handful.

Couchant for days on sods above rafters
He shaved and flushed the butts, stitched all together
Into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch,
And left them gaping at his Midas touch.”

Surely, somewhere in Heaney’s notion of “pinning down” one’s world, a handful at a time, is where making a living intersects with making art.

For years, my mother has wrapped up bits and pieces of home in brown paper packages tied up with string. They make their way from Castledawson to Phoenix, their contents in one piece, filled with Antrim Guardian newspaper clippings about people I used to know but might not remember, Cadbury’s chocolate, three or four packets of Tayto cheese and onion, and something for me to “throw on.”

Ma’s first job was in Crawford’s shop in Castledawson, where she learned, among other things, how to wrap a tidy parcel in brown paper and string. As she had learned to bake and sew by watching my grandmother, so she watched the proprietor, Jim Crawford, wrap packages for the customers. She reminds me this was before there was such a thing as Scotch Tape, so sometimes she would use a seal wax over the knotted string.

Soon she was expertly preparing parcels of sweets and biscuits for those who wanted to send a taste of home to relatives across the water, Mrs. O’Connor, whose daughter was in England; Jim Crawford himself had devised a way to tie newspapers with string so they could be easily mailed to relatives far away in Australia. My mother still has the knack for it, and to this day I cannot bring myself to open the Mid-Ulster Mail newspaper that contains the news of Seamus Heaney’s death.

Years later, when the girl behind the counter was all grown up and the mother who stayed home with us, one of her favorite jobs was “backing books.” By the first day of school in September, she had saved brown wrapping paper for this special task. There was an art to it, and so naturally it fell under my mother’s bailiwick. I can see her in my mind’s eye, at the kitchen table in our house on the Dublin Road waiting for my brother and me to return home from our first day back at school. It is a September afternoon, and she is ready with brown paper and scissors. She places each book carefully on the middle of a sheet of brown paper, and with a few quick snips, folds, and tucks, she has it covered, ready for us to write our names on the front.

I remember one September, because my mother was ill and in the hospital, I had taken it upon myself to back my new history textbook. Of course I couldn’t do it right. Like so many things, this was something my mother had made look so easy, but unlike my mother I had not learned by watching. Clumsy, I could not fit the brown paper neatly under the spine at both ends, so I gave up and went to school, my book un-backed. For my sins, I was subjected to a memorably sarcastic tirade from a teacher who just didn’t want to hear that my mother lay in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. She may as well have been on the other side of the world in that instant, and some forty years later, I can still feel the flush of embarrassment on my face – but then I look up and there they are – Sarena Mann’s figures in flight – just waiting to lighten my load.

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Immigration matters

From there to here . . .

Yvonne hails from Antrim, Northern Ireland, and has lived in the desert southwest of the United States for almost thirty years. Married, with a daughter who is navigating her path through the "teen tunnel," and a haughty cat, Atticus, she has spent the better part of the last three decades in the classroom as a student, teacher, and administrator. Her mid-life crisis came as a sneaky Stage II invasive breast cancer diagnosis which subsequently sent her to the blogosphere where she found a virtual home away from home . . .